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SU Search for Meaning Fest includes three talks with astronomy themes

If you’re looking for meaning you may be able to get some clues in February at Seattle University. The university’s annual Search for Meaning Festival is set for February 25, 2017, and will bring more than 50 authors and artists to campus to tackle topics surrounding the human quest for meaning and the characteristics of an ethical and well-lived life. Three of these talks may be of particular interest to astronomy enthusiasts.

Marie Benedict, author of The Other Einstein (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2016) will talk about her novel and explore the life of Mileva Maric, who was Albert Einstein’s first wife and a physicist herself, and about the manner in which personal tragedy inspired Mileva’s possible role in the creation of Einstein’s “miracle year” theories. She’ll also discuss how Mileva’s story is, in many ways, the story of many intelligent, educated women whose own aspirations and contributions were marginalized, or even hidden, in favor of those of their spouses.

Rev. George V. Coyne, SJ, former director of the Vatican Observatory and currently the endowed McDevitt Chair in Physics at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, is author of Wayfarers in the Cosmos: The Human Quest for Meaning (Crossroad, 2002). Father Coyne will talk about the history of the evolution of life in the cosmos—a history which may lead us to a deeper understanding of what many secular physicists say themselves about the cosmos: that a loving creator stands behind it.